Back in the good, old days you only need to write awesome content and somehow, some way traffic will appear. Ten to fifteen years ago the whole idea of “build it and they will come” actually worked. You only need to be a good writer and you can make serious money off your website. Fast forward to today, you can be the best writer in the world and you can write about topics that really touch people’s lives and add value to their lives; you can go through all sorts of hoops coming up with the very best content.

The problem is if that content doesn’t get shared chances are very high that you will not make money off your website. That’s the bottom line. That’s the harsh modern reality you have to deal with. If you are thinking of making money online through content or through online publishing initiatives, you need to listen up.

You need to focus on writing engaging content that has to jump through several hoops. First, the content has to be engaging enough for people to want to read it. Second, the content has to get people to share that material on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms.

Finally, that content should be so engaging that it pushes the reader further down the sales process. The sales process as any veteran online marketer knows is the know-like-trust process. For somebody to buy from you they must first trust you. However, for them to trust you they must first like your brand. In turn for them to like your brand they must first feel that they know enough about you.

Truly engaging content pushes people down the know-like-trust process. Crappy content just sits there. It’s nice to look at. There are some factoids you can pick up. It’s engaging at some level, but it really doesn’t do anything. If you are serious about making money online, your definition of engaging content must focus ultimately on conversion. If that piece of content doesn’t get you closer to the point where somebody whips out their credit card and does something to put dollars in your pocket then you’re just wasting your time with that content. You need to rewrite that content until you come up with engaging content.

You need your stuff shared

The problem with social media content is that this stuff is not going to happen automatically. Your content won’t get shared by accident. It’s not like somebody is waiting to click on that like or share button. It doesn’t happen that way. There has to be something in the content itself that engages people in a purely emotional level for them to get off the fence and share the content. The good news is that people are actually willing and eager to share your stuff. You know when somebody’s on Facebook they want to look like a hero in front of their friends. They want to be the first person in their circle of friends to come across a certain type of content. You just need to make that person’s job easier. You need to first attract the right kind of eyeballs and be exciting enough for that person to feel that they would get some sort of emotional pay off by sharing your content.

There is no such thing as viral content

I’m sorry to break this to you, but there is no such thing as viral content. While content with emotional triggers are important the content in of itself is not what makes a piece of content viral. What makes a piece of content viral is the network. In other words, if you get a piece of content in front of the eyeballs of a very influential person, chances are this content will travel much farther and wider than if you got it in front of thousands of people who have no friends online. Do you see how all this works out? It’s all about appealing to the needs of influence leaders in your niche. If you don’t play the game that way chances are your content won’t gain much traction. How do you make this happen?

Focus on viral needs

You have to remember that truly influential people have certain set of needs. The list is very long, but if I was going to boil them down to one thing. It really all boils down to looking like a hero. People will share stuff on Facebook because they feel that when they share this material it makes them look good in front of the people that they’re trying to impress. Fair enough, right? So your job is to position your content in such a way that it tells the person, in no uncertain terms, that if they share your content they would look more authoritative, they would look smarter and they would otherwise increase their social stock with the people following them or the people that they’re trying to impress.

Create a sense of emotional urgency

One of the most powerful ways to gain the attention of influence leaders consuming your content is to create a sense of emotional urgency. Appeal to fear, appeal to curiosity. Regardless of what you do there has to be a strong, palpable emotional push. If your content just lies there and basically tells the person, “Hey, this is important content but you don’t have to share it if you don’t want to”. Then your content is just going to remain flat. You need to share your content with influential social media users and pack it with emotional triggers. It’s not going to happen overnight.

Learn from social media engagement

To ensure that you figure out the social sharing emotional triggers of the influence leaders you’re sharing content with you need to engage with them. You need to figure out their hot buttons. You need to learn how they actually engage with your content by looking at your site statistics. By putting all these different data points together you can come up with an evolutionary process where you continuously fine tune your messaging and your articles until you get a lot of clicks.

Once you get a lot of clicks then you need to pay attention to how widely you get shared. Again, it’s not going to happen overnight but as long as you’re paying attention to the right data points the picture will become clear. You will be able to see how these different data points fit each other and you can craft a more effective viral content strategy.

The worst thing that you can do is to try once and assume that you’ve perfected it just because people share your stuff. That’s the wrong way to play the game. Instead you need to look at the whole picture and come up with variations of your content and see which elements play a tremendous role in how far your content goes. If you get upon one particular element that almost ensures that your materials will go viral then you need to move on to the next element and fine tune that.

At the end of the process you should be able to come up with some sort of formula where you have a high likelihood that, regardless of the content that you produce, your content will be shared by the right people. In other words, you’ve reached a point where your materials will predictably go viral in your niche.

The deceptive thing about the social media success is that you might think that you’re a genius when you get lucky. The good news is that almost anybody trying their hand at social media marketing can get lucky. That’s the good news.

Unfortunately, that is also the bad news. It’s so easy to get conceded and assume that that rush of lucky moves that you made indicates that you are some sorts of social media marketing genius.

You’d be surprise to how many people start on social marketing courses based on short successful period that they had. They won’t tell you that all their efforts after this short time period have led to failure. Of course you can entrust them to say that to you but the cold hard reality is that you cannot rely on short rush of success with social media marketing.

The best way to look at any kind of social media marketing campaign is the long game. Don’t focus on just a short period where everything seems to be going right. Focus on a multi-year approach. Focus on a huge window time frame and you will see whether you have what it takes to actually succeed in social media marketing.

The good news is that the secret to sustainable success is not as hard or as mysterious as you may think. Here are just somethings to mentally chew on:

You have to take the time to do it

Here’s some bad news, if you want to get successful in anything, you have you put in the time.

I know this is something that you want to stay away from. I know this is something that you don’t want to hear but that’s the bottom line. Anything that you want to achieve in some level of success in, whether it’s running five minute mile or losing weight or doing well at your job, you have to stick to it. You have to put in the time. The more time you devote to doing anything, the smarter you get. Why?
You figure out faster ways of doing things. You figure out ways of increasing quality. This takes time. It involves a long process. However, this is time well invested.

You have to be consisted with your content quality

Blogging just to get eyeballs is an art form, seriously. But if that isn’t bad enough, blogging to get conversions is a science. So, you have to be consisted with your content quality otherwise you’re not going to convert people.

There are many bloggers that have no problems dragging tons of people to their website. They employ all sorts of tricks. They pour all sorts of shenanigans and people somehow end up on their website. The problem is that these people are often starving. Why?

They don’t figure out how to convert those people. There reason is that 9 times out of 10 they lost sight of the power of content quality. If you’re going to curate content, you have to make sure that your curation editorial policies are tight. Otherwise, conversion is always going to slip between the cracks. No conversion means no income. That’s the bottom line

You have to engage with followers and fans

As I’ve mention earlier, it’s relatively easy to pull eyeballs of social media networks. You only need to focus on certain controversial topics. You only need to reverse engineer certain types of content. This is not rocket science.

Unfortunately, this is also a one way street to social media obscurity. You have to remember that you’re not the only niche player in town, there are other marketers targeting the same niche you’re focused on. You have to make it clear in no uncertain terms to your would be followers that you are worth following.

You can’t do this when you share the same content as your competitors. You can’t do this when you engage with your followers and fans in a very flat and mechanical way. You have to truly engage with them. This means that you have to ask what they’re thinking about. You also have to communicate to the world at large that you’re paying attention to this people. Because you have to remember that these people are the secret to your success. They’re the ones responsible for whatever success you get with your social media marketing efforts.

You have to reach out to other niche influence leaders

I know that at this point, you might be thinking that you have your hands full. After all becoming an expert or becoming credible in any kind of subject matter takes a lot of work, it takes a lot of time. I get all that.

However, you have to understand that simply aiming for credibility is not going to take you all the way. The millions of anonymous and obscure credible people on the internet, they’re not going anywhere anytime soon. They’re all going to remain struggling for a long time to come.

If you want to break out of that crowd, you need to reach out to influenced leaders; you need to get on their radar so they can lend you some of their credibility. You have to remember that when a highly influential person on social media mentions your name or your website, that mention carries a lot of rate. It might not drive a lot of topic overnight but if they repeat that enough times and this resonates with other influenced leaders. Guess what will happen?

You too will become an influenced leader and eventually, this could translate into cold hard balance in your bank account. That’s the bottom line.

If you want your content to generate a lot of results, you need to make sure that it’s formatted properly. Put in the simplest terms possible, you have to present your content in such a way that it appeals to a wide range of people.

People would not be intimidated with your content. People would easily find your content accessible and friendly. The more people are engage on a positive level with your content, the higher the likelihood that they would interact with your content. They would click on your your ads. They would share your content or they would even blog about your content. It’s all about where you take them as far as emotionally spaces are concern.

Unfortunately, a lot of marketers are completely clueless regarding this. They just use standard and generic word press themes. They just publish in a very common and predictable way. Not surprisingly, there results fall flat. Whatever positive results that they may enjoy are due primarily to their extra expenditure of capital on their business.

You don’t have to spend too much money on your content. In fact, if you format it properly and if you engage with the right eyeballs, your content can take a life of its own. You can engineer success into your content. Here are just some formatting tips that will enable you to get a competitive advantage:

Lots of white space

You have to understand the people who simply do not have time to consume content. In fact, the average length of time that people take to consume online content is shrinking year after year. Given the fact that there huge numbers of mobile devices that people use to consume content on the go, this length of content consumption is sure to go even lower.

People are in a hurry. People’s attentions are fragmented. This is why you need to format your content in such a way that your content is easy to cut up and easy to digest. This involves a lot of white space. If you are just going to present content in one intimidating block of text, you are sure to drive away a lot of your potential readers.

Graphical headers

Pictures are never emotionally neutral. All pictures have emotional messages. Use this to your advantage by using pictures as graphical headers that the very least these pictures will set the emotional tone of the content that you are presenting at the very least, it will set the emotional direction of the content.

You have to remember that pictures can be used as cues and if you cue up a piece of content properly, more people will dwell on the content and consume it fully. When people consume your content fully, the changes that content being shared increase tremendously.

One sentence paragraphs

The general rule is you should never split up one complete idea into more than paragraph. However, if you write a certain way, you can condense a multi-sentence idea into one sentence.

In such a situation, it’s okay to create one sentence paragraphs. I can’t even begin to tell you how powerful one sentence paragraphs are. You have to remember that people are in a hurry. Also, people are always asking themselves what is the point of this article.

When you give them one sentence paragraphs, you quickly summarize a certain portion of the article and this can lead to a much better retention and a much better comprehension. Use as many one sentence paragraphs as you can.

Emotional triggers

Even if you get the formatting portion of a proper text presentation down, you might still be leaving a lot of money on the table. You have to remember that people are emotional creatures. As much as we talk a good game about our logic and reasoning abilities, the bottom line is we are often emotional. We often make decision based purely on emotions and then later back cracking trying to cope up with reasonable sounding explanation for why we decided the way we decided.

Never underestimate the power of emotion. This is why you need to put in as many emotional triggers as you can content as possible. Try to strain a reader along. Try to use emotional triggers to drag the reader’s eyeballs as far down the page as possible.

Fonts that prompt further reading

There are certain font sizes and font types that prompt the reader to read more pages on your blog. You have to remember that if you want to convert that reader into either a mailing list member or if you want that person to click on an ad so that you can make a commission, you need to get that person to stay on your pages. You can’t do this if you just allow yourself one bite at the apple with one page.
If you’re using one page, make sure you use many different fonts that push them to different parts of their websites or push them to take action. The longer you can get them to stay on your page, the higher the likelihood that you will make more money of that reader.

Imagine a world without Facebook. Boring, right? But as I came to realize, Facebook isn’t a global phenomenon as many would like to think. In China, they have their very own Facebook that is being enjoyed by over half a billion Chinese. In fact, as at 2009 statistics revealed that Qzone (http://qzone.qq.com – China’s number one social media network) had slightly over 200,000,000 active subscribers.

That was recorded at a time when Facebook was only bragging of about 170,000,000 active users. Well, let us not forget that Facebook is the biggest social network that the rest of the world has ever witnessed. So, how comes China has refused come aboard this great ship? It wasn’t always like that obviously. The Chinese people had their fun with Facebook before the year 2009 when they banned its use in China in favor of local social media platforms.

Local entrepreneurs saw this as an opportunity to establish their own social media platforms. The company that benefited the most from the ban was Tencent. Before the ban, Tencent was still a major player in the telecom industry especially in the field of mobile value-added services and online advertising. The corporation created Qzone in the year 2005 to be an addition to the social offers that the company’s customers previously enjoyed.

The latest reports claim that Qzone currently boasts of slightly more than 563 million users compared to Facebook’s 840 million users. The high number of their subscribers reveals just how desperately the Chinese people needed a social media platform; and a locally owned one for that matter. When compared to other social media platforms in China, Qzone provides its users with a variety of possibilities.

This is the case especially where personalization is desirable.

Despite the high number of Qzone’s subscribers that are passive, the platform’s mother company (Tencent) has managed to reap big in returns as most of the services offered in Qzone are paid services.

Think of all the features of a social media platform that you enjoy; blogging using words, sharing images and videos, sharing ideas and experiences, accessing amazing quotes, updating relationship updates and everything relevant in your life.

Qzone.qq.com accords you the opportunity to do all the things mentioned above with only one condition; you have to pay for each of the services and it isn’t that cheap either. That is probably why the average Chinese individual has opted to use other local social media platforms like Renren and Sina Corp. These two companies offer pretty much the same services that are offered by the giant platform Qzone. But this affordability also comes at the cost of quality. The quality of the features and services are way inferior to that provided by Qzone.

Lastly, since its inception in 2005 and notably in the year 2009 when the major competitor was barred from providing its services in the country, Qzone has experienced an upward growth curve with the investors reaping huge profits. Compared to other platforms such as Google Plus and Windows Live, Qzone has set the limit so high that other platforms will crumble before they attain such great feats.

Have you ever wondered whether or not it would be profitable to start your own YouTube channel? It is completely possible to earn money from the popular website, either through ad revenue, a YouTube partnership or both.

There are millions of people who have created their own channels on this website. YouTube gives teenagers and adults an opportunity to create videos on just about anything they want, such as makeup tutorials, gaming advice, hairstyling tips and directions for putting things together. If you ever want to learn how to do something, this is the one site that you probably choose to visit.

Some people prefer to watch videos on different topics instead of reading articles. The visuals may keep them engaged, especially if the person in the video is friendly and engaging. And, if you still are not sure that it is possible to make a living on YouTube, there is quite an impressive list of people who have made it happen.

Top Earners: True YouTube Success Stories

Believe it or not, it is easy to find out how much some of your favorite internet sensations are making on the website. Social Blade is a website that allows you to type in the username of the person to find out more information about their earnings, number of subscribers and views.

Some of your favorites may earn a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars per month. These are just a few of the top earners who have managed to utilize the site to their advantage, so much so that they have become rich because of it!

Can you imagine making tons of money just by doing a few silly pranks in your local neighborhood? Well, that is exactly what Yousef Erakat did with his channel, fouseyTUBE. He is only 25 years old and is a millionaire because of the success he has had on YouTube.

So, what is it that he does? Yousef has created videos of himself pranking random people and some of the people who are closest to him, such as his mother and best friends.

There is an entire video of him tricking his best friend into going on a mission in an attempt to get tickets to see One Direction. When his friend realizes it is a prank, he gets upset, but that is when Yousef hands him tickets to see the show.

There are other videos where he pranks the pizza man and even offers brand name sneakers to homeless people. Many are calling him a humorous inspiration. He currently makes up to 1.9 million each year. He has more than five million subscribers and about 100 videos on his channel.

Yousef is not the only one who has had major success. Alastair Aiken has had his share of success with YouTube too. He is commonly known as Ali-A to the gaming community. When people want to find out what he thinks about some of the latest games on various consoles, such as Xbox One, they tend to head straight to his channel to see what he is saying about them.

Despite being only 21 years old, he makes up to 1.9 million each year too. He has dedicated lots of time to playing games, discussing the pros and cons of them and uploading tons of videos for the fans.

In fact, he currently has more than 1000 videos posted and that number continues to increase. He has had more than 1 billion views, which is an astonishing number.

These are just two of the many people who make a living from this site. They have turned their dreams into reality, and that is something you may be able to do too.

How Can I Make Money on YouTube?

Now that you know there are plenty of people who are earning money on this website, you may want to get involved by creating your own videos. After all, who does not want to earn an income from videos that are fun to create? If you are looking to get started, there are useful tips that may help you along the way.

Make sure that you have the right equipment. Viewers want to watch videos that are not too dark or grainy. Use high-quality recording equipment to ensure everything you post looks good at all times. And, make sure to edit out any mistakes you make while recording.

Pick something that excites you. If you love pranks, why not start doing your own? However, you may have other video ideas in mind. You might want to show people how to style and dye their hair or how to dance.

If you are good at something or have certain interests, use that to your advantage. Begin making exciting videos using the knowledge you already have. And, remember it does take time to build a following and to start earning a lot of money based on views, but you certainly can do it if you are dedicated enough.